Harold began to draw near to each other."
Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of
detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the {283} rhetorical
machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he
"made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating antithesis. In
his _History of England_, he inaugurated the picturesque method of
historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.
Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method
of turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among
his essays, the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive_,
_Warren Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical
subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public
historic relations, such as the essays on _Addison_, _Bunyan_, and _The
Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of
criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would
not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory
kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.

Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the
writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the
one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age."
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly
in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature.
He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation
of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the
German {284} romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque, and
contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, articles on
Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen
Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with
Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was
attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the
writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists
was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke
disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred
the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical
essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire,
which are free from hi